Farage makes hat-trick of errors in Marr interview

Nigel Farage managed to make no fewer than three factual errors in an 11-minute interview on the Andrew Marr programme on 21 Feb.

The UKIP leader first got Britain’s budget maths wrong. He said “we are paying over £50 million a day in a membership fee” to the EU. As InFacts has already shown when Tory MEP Daniel Hannan made the same mistake, the gross amount we actually send Brussels is £35 million a day. This is because Margaret Thatcher negotiated a rebate on the UK’s budget contribution, cutting the amount sent to the EU.

What’s more, if you net off the amount Britain gets back from Brussels (for agriculture, science and so forth) and the proportion of the EU’s aid budget that we count towards our own development target, the cost is £17 million a day. That seems like a reasonable price for full access to the EU’s single market with its 500 million people.

When contacted by InFacts, a UKIP spokesperson said a figure of £55 million a day was reasonable as the UK’s membership fee, citing research by Full Fact. However, after InFacts pointed out errors in its calculation, Full Fact corrected their piece.

Farage then reiterated the assertion that Britain could have access to the single market without free movement of people. He said that David Cameron’s contention that you couldn’t was “completely and utterly untrue”. It is what Farage said that is untrue. As InFacts showed when Hannan made the same error, no country has full access to the single market without free movement of people.

The UKIP spokesperson said that he believed Britain would be able to negotiate a free trade deal if it quit the EU. The snag is a free trade deal is inferior to full single market access. For example, no country has managed to cut a free trade agreement with the EU that gives its financial services industry a passport to operate across the trade bloc. It is theoretically possible that Britain might get a special deal that no other country so far has managed to clinch with the EU. But given that this would open a Pandora’s box of demands from other member states, there is no basis for assuming this.

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To complete his hat-trick of errors, Farage repeated his contention that if Britain stayed in the EU, “we’ll be part of a Europe that wants Turkey to be a member within five years”. When UKIP pushed this line in a party political broadcast, InFacts demonstrated that it was fanciful. Turkey’s membership process started in 1959 and so far only one of 35 negotiating “chapters” has been closed. Even if all chapters were closed, every EU country (including the UK) would have a veto.

The UKIP spokesperson pointed to page 46 in this European Commission document to back up Farage’s contention that the EU wants Turkey to join in 2021. What the document actually shows is something completely different: proposed budget allocations up to 2020 to help the country’s long drawn out process of trying to join the bloc.

3 Responses to “Farage makes hat-trick of errors in Marr interview”

“This is because Margaret Thatcher negotiated a rebate on the UK’s budget contribution, cutting the amount sent to the EU”!. Get your facts right , Labour gave up our rebate for nothing in return.
Also “The snag is a free trade deal is inferior to full single market access.”, may be so but to take a small hit is still better than being a member !.
And on you comments re “Turkey’s membership” , that is still going to happen and when it does we are better out of that club!!!.
So get your facts right before you criticize others !.

Actually Jim, Tony Blair gave up a 7% cut in the rebate. This cost the UK around £1 Billion per year. In return he got a host of reform promises which, funny thing, never actually materialized.

Now, good old Dave, has negotiated a load of ‘reform promises’ with the EU to try to keep us in. I hope the British public learn from their mistakes. Especially considering that the following countries Czech Rep, France, Germany, Ireland, Romania, Slovakia, Luxembourg, Lithuania and Slovenia all have elections for their own countries within the next 2 years. A change in government in any of these could see Daves Special Deal scuppered if the incoming government disagrees with it before it gets into the Treaties.